Innovation, Speciation: strange DNA finding (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, December 01, 2018, 14:12 (1974 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: But now perhaps you’ll tell me why a God who is capable of not knowing what he wants, or of knowing what he wants but having trouble working out how to get it, is incapable of wanting something to keep himself occupied.

DAVID: […] I view God as purposeful in everything He does.

You still refuse to answer my question.

DAVID: He is The Creator in religions' concept of Him. (Yes.) I really know nothing more about HIM. (Nobody knows any more, so why do you insist that his purpose in creating 50,000 webs etc. was to produce humans?) He understands the complexity of life He has designed, because He knew how to do it and make it perpetually alive.(Obviously, if he created it. But you keep telling us he was purposeful, and then you refuse to discuss his possible purpose – see above.) I don't scurry back to design. Design and God are totally intertwined in any philosophic view of the question whether God exists. (This whole discussion is about his purpose, not about whether he exists.) Design is why you admit you are agnostic. (Yes.) When you delve into God's personality you are getting back to Adler's wise admonition He is a personage like no other person. (We cannot KNOW anything, including whether your God exists, but this forum exists to discuss all the related subjects. I do not think a possible God’s nature and purpose should be off limits, especially when you go on and on about your God’s purposefulness). He is pure energy and we are material persons who have minds and reason, and are a little similar to Him but no more. When you try to make God a person like us, you are in very murky waters, with guesses and nothing more. (I am not making him a person like us. I am suggesting he may have some of our characteristics if we are created “in his image”. You have agreed on the possibility that evolution might be an experiment - endowing him with human ignorance of one kind or another. And so we come back to my original question: if one possibility is the human-type desire to find out what would happen if…or to find a way of creating what he wants to create, why do you refuse to accept that another possibility might be the human-type desire for an occupation?)

DAVID: In all of the above mashed get-together paragraph in one strange theme. You ask what is God's purpose and I keep telling everyone it was to create current humans, and then you tell me I haven't answered you which means that you want to know about His underlying thought pattern as to why He chose that purpose.

The mashed get-together paragraph answers your mashed get-together reflections on the subject of a purposeful God. If God does exist, and his purpose in creating life was to create humans, it is perfectly natural to ask about his purpose in creating humans and every other life form. And you can’t identify a purpose without trying to read the "thought patterns" of the doer.

DAVID: I don't know why you need that guess on my part. It is all part of your attempt to study Him as if He were human or part human due to the fact that He and we have consciousness. What is wrong with accepting that we humans are the current and probably the real end point of a long process? And simply being satisfied with it? Dayenu. Do you think His motives are nefarious? Knowing his motives will not help you accept God. Nor will guessing create any more understanding of God than we have now.

The problem is not your belief that humans are the current end point in terms of our consciousness, but your belief that he created 50,000 spider webs etc. as stepping stones to humans. (But see the "Neanderthal" thread). You want me to believe that there is a being who potentially has total control over me, but not ask about his nature and purpose! The subject has preoccupied theologians ever since they first produced the idea of a single God. “Knowing his motives will not help you accept God.” What should I “accept”? That there is a conscious mind which specially created me and all my fellow creatures but it doesn't matter why, or what he might be like? I might as well believe in the sun or in chance as my creator. If his nature and purpose don’t matter, should I “accept” the God of Deism, who created life and left it to run its own course, i.e. a non-interventionist God (which I have proposed as a possible theistic explanation for the higgledy-piggledy history of life)? Well no, because you said on the Einstein thread that you believe he has guided you through your life. (I asked if you thought he also guided the lives of tyrants and their victims and of victims of natural disasters, but you had no idea.) So you believe in a God who has benevolent feelings towards you, but you don’t want anyone else to conjecture why he created the rest of his creations or what sort of feelings (if any) he might have about them.